AI4Life, the first workshop on AI (artificial intelligence) in Vietnam, held in May, and AI4VN, which took place in August, gathered Vietnamese and overseas Vietnamese scientists.

The organizer, the Ministry of Science & Technology (MST), vowed to accelerate AI R&D in the 4.0 revolution era.

In October, the ministry once again showed its strong determination to develop AI when releasing its AI R&D plan.

Chatbots on e-commerce websites or online shops exist on Facebook. But Google’s chatbot is different. No one ‘tells’ the chatbot how it needs to respond to specific questions, but it has to ‘learn’ itself, based on big data provided to it.

This is the result of research of scientists at Google Brain, including Le Viet Quoc, a Vietnamese and panel speaker at AI4VN. The technique used is machine learning, an important field of AI.

Over the last two years, a race to develop AI has occurred all over the globe with 20 countries in the EU releasing their strategies on developing AI in both R&D and education. Developed countries have budgeted billions of dollars on strategies with the ambition to lead the world in AI development.

According to Deputy Minister of Science & Technology Bui The Duy, Vietnam needs to focus on some segments in the global value chain, choose the right niche markets and deal with specific problems in Vietnam.

With limited financial capability, Vietnamese enterprises should think carefully about what they need and they should not waste time on research that Google, Facebook and Microsoft have done.

An AI development program has been drawn up with three major tasks 1) investing in AI research and research infrastructure 2) developing related apps and 3) training a labor force for AI.

MST will invest $1-1.5 million on a modern calculation infrastructure system which will be shared by research institutes and universities. It will also build an open data warehouse to serve the research and development of AI, based on the project on the digitalized Vietnamese knowledge system.

The participants at AI4life and AI4VN workshops suggested that Vietnam should start with matters related to the socio-economic development, productivity increase, and living standards.